1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a technique for supporting designing of a GUI (graphical user interface).
2. Background Art
In recent years, graphical user interfaces (hereinafter, referred to as “GUIs”) are widely adopted in digital instruments such as digital television sets, recorders, and mobile telephones. A GUI is made up of GUI components including buttons, images, and data display lists.
By operating GUI components displayed on a screen of a display unit via an input device such as a mouse, a keyboard, and a remote controller, a user is capable of using numerous functions provided in a digital instrument.
In addition to enabling a user to easily invoke and use functions of a digital instrument, a GUI of a digital instrument is also required to make an operation of the digital instrument itself a fun experience and to enhance designability of the digital instrument.
Therefore, more and more digital instruments are being mounted with GUIs which not only draw still images but are also eye-catching and fun to use due to the utilization of animation, visual effects, and the like.
On the other hand, heavy use of animation, visual effects, and the like increases drawing throughput of a GUI. Therefore, there may be cases where a limited hardware performance of a digital instrument is unable to draw a GUI at an expected performance. For example, there may be cases where a GUI animation that is smooth and beautiful ends up being drawn as a stuttering, clumsy animation.
When a GUI cannot be drawn at an expected performance, an animation or a visual effect adopted for the purpose of enhancing designability of the GUI or making the GUI easier and fun to use conversely becomes a factor which degrades designability of the GUI or inhibits user operability of the GUI.
Therefore, a GUI designer must design a GUI with full consideration given to balancing designability and usability of the GUI with GUI performance. In addition, when a GUI cannot be drawn at an expected performance, a design of the GUI must be improved in order to ensure that the GUI is drawn at the expected performance.
In order to improve design as described above, the GUI designer must be aware of how a design change of a GUI affects performance of the GUI on a digital instrument. However, for a designer without expert knowledge, it is difficult to understand performance of hardware (CPU speed performance, memory read/write performance, graphics hardware processing performance, and the like) or a software program structure of the digital instrument which determines GUI performance.
As prior art for addressing such issues, for example, Non-Patent Document 1 discloses a known technique for visually notifying a designer of a GUI performance lowering factor by displaying a graphic representing a GUI redrawing area overlapped on a display of the GUI.
In other words, when displaying a GUI as an animation, instead of an entire area of a display screen being redrawn for each frame, only a difference image between a previous frame and a current frame is redrawn in the current frame. In addition, the greater the surface area of the redrawn area, the greater the GUI drawing processing time and the lower the GUI performance.
In consideration thereof, in Non-Patent Document 1, by highlighting an outline of a redrawn area using a bold line, an association between GUI performance and GUI design is notified to the designer. Furthermore, in Non-Patent Document 1, the designer determines from the highlighted image that GUI performance has decreased due to a large redrawn area, and changes the design of the GUI so as to reduce the redrawn area.
However, in Non-Patent Document 1, highlighting of a redrawn area is merely overlapped on the GUI when drawing of the GUI is updated. Therefore, when displaying the GUI as an animation, the bold lines indicating outlines of areas that are redrawn with the updating of frames are also successively updated, which makes it difficult to determine in which frame a decrease in drawing performance has occurred. In addition, Non-Patent Document 1 does not present any information representing improvements that should be made on a GUI such as how much a surface area of a redrawn area must be reduced in order to prevent degradation in GUI performance. Therefore, the user cannot promptly understand improvements that should be made on the GUI.
Non-Patent Document 1: ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components Reference